Translation style

Contributing covers how to submit a translation. This page is the standard the words themselves are held to.

Minecraft is already translated into your language, and a player reads the mod’s text in the same session as the game’s own. So the game’s own language file settles every question below. Look a choice up there rather than deciding what sounds right.

Words the game already has

Where Minecraft names a thing, use the name Minecraft gives it in your language, spelled the way the game spells it. A Chest, an Ender Chest, a Lodestone, an advancement, a game rule, a chunk: the player learned each of those words from the game.

German writes Endertruhe, because that is what block.minecraft.ender_chest says. Danish writes klods for a chunk rather than the English loanword, because that is the word Danish Minecraft uses.

Anything the game does not name is an ordinary word and needs no special treatment.

Casing

Casing differs by language, and the mod follows whatever the game does. English labels are Title Case, so the English reads “Show HUD”. German and Danish capitalize only the first word and their own nouns, so the same label reads “HUD anzeigen” and “Vis HUD”. Do not carry English Title Case into a language that does not use it.

Addressing the player

Minecraft speaks to the player informally in every language that makes the distinction: du in German and Danish, the ty forms in Polish. Use the same. The formal address is wrong even where a manual would use it.

Register

Short plain sentences, one idea in each, in the present tense. Each one says what an option does for the player. That is how Minecraft writes its own options, and the mod’s settings sit in the same kind of screen.

Marketing words are out, and so are filler openers of the “Please note that” kind and any stock phrase your language would not put in a game. Minecraft never calls anything seamless, powerful, or effortless.

Off-states

Where the English says what turning an option off does, say it as a full sentence in your language’s own Minecraft phrasing: German “Deaktivieren …”, Danish “Deaktivering …”. A bare “Off: …” label is not a form Minecraft uses.

The value list of a named option is a different thing, and labeling each value with a colon there is correct.

Where the game breaks its own rule

Follow the game rather than the rule wherever the two disagree. English Minecraft capitalizes every block and mob in running prose and still writes book in lower case, so the mod writes it in lower case too. Keeping the rule where the game drops it would leave the mod’s text differing from the game’s own on the same screen.

Not style

Which keys exist, what order they come in, and the %s, %1$s, and \n inside a string are mechanical rather than matters of taste. The build checks them, and Contributing states them.